Germaine Dulac

Country:

France

About artist / group:

Germaine Dulac was the
first feminist filmmaker (that we know of) and a key figure in the French
avant-garde scene of the 1920s. During the early 1900s, she wrote for the two
feminist periodicals, La Fronde and La Francaise. She was politically active
and demanded her rights as a filmmaker. After experiencing difficulties in
making the films she wanted to, she started her own production company, Delia
Film. Dulac fought for film to be seen as its own art form – the seventh art –
and coined her own terms, such as ‘The Integral Film’, ‘cinematic movement’,
‘rhythmic film’. Dulac felt that moving images could speak for themselves and
she worked on a number of abstract silent films, Themes of Variations being one
of them. Germaine Dulac was thrown out into the cold by the surrealist men
after she made the film The Seashell and the Clergymen in 1927. All of these
years of not showing her films. All of these years of her being unknown and
forgotten.